Tree Testing

Tree Testing

Tree Testing is a online evaluation that assesses the findability of key topic areas and navigation labels on your site, by asking users to indicate where they expect information to be within the site architecture. Depending on your stage of website development, insights from this method allows you to identify key problem areas or to fine-tune your hierarchy and labels.

Methodology

Conducted either as an independent evaluation of an existing site or as a follow-up to an online card sort, a tree test seeks to assess the user’s ability to locate key topics and understand navigation labels on your site. Designed as a survey, the proposed site architecture is programmed into the evaluation. Users invited to participate are asked a series of tasks to find key topics within the architecture. For each task, participants are prompted with a short scenario of a common activity on the site and are then presented with the programmed “tree” to indicate where they would anticipate the information to be found. Once they are done exploring the site architecture, users mark the navigation label that would contain the content they seek. The results are aggregated to calculate user success rates for each task, analyze clickpaths, and discover alternative locations in the site map that users go to find the information.

Benefits

Test the findability of key information within a current or proposed information architecture

Determine where customers are getting lost within your site and at what level in the hierarchy

Questions

What hierarchy and navigation labels are best understood by customers?

Is the website hierarchy well-structured and aligned with how users search for information?

How successful are users in finding what they are looking for on the site without backtracking?

If customer are unable to find what they are looking for, where do they get lost?

What alternative locations within your site map are intuitive for crosslinking content areas?

Insights

The Tree Test evaluation strips away the aesthetic design elements and evaluates your site’s architectural backbone. For each task, analysis of the success rates and click-paths reflect the organization’s effectiveness, as well as determine if respondents go directly to their selected choice or back track at any point due to confusion, thereby shedding light on possible areas for crosslinking. While a Tree Test is typically conducted at the early stage of the web development process, this research can be performed at any point for sites with navigation issues and help identify where customers are getting lost. As a means to update the site IA structure, supplementing this research with an online card sort can provide an additional layer of understanding into how your customers would intuitively organize your site content.

“Over the last three years, we have worked extensively with eVOC Insights to help us with a broad range of research needs. The consultants at eVOC are very effective at both strategic and tactical levels, and have strong knowledge of our industry and of Web best practices in general. The insights gained have impacted our business strategy and have resulted in clear improvements on key performance measures such as online conversion. We highly recommend the team at eVOC.”— Barrie Seidenberg, President / CEO, Viator.com